Dame Joan Ruddock, the former Labour MP, has described holding a pillow in her hands as she considered ending the life of her terminally ill husband who was in extreme pain.
In desperation, she called an out-of-hours GP service at night, telling them: “Either you come or I will end his life. I don’t know what the consequences are, but I will do it.”
A doctor “eventually” attended her husband, Frank Doran, also a former Labour MP, and administered pain relief. Doran died seven hours later.
Ruddock said she had considered how to end Doran’s life using the pillow. “I asked myself what will I have to do to ensure that, if he struggles, I can maintain the pressure – because it has to be ended,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
Ruddock, who served as a minister in Gordon Brown’s government and retired as an MP in 2015, called for a change in the law on assisted dying to allow doctors to help terminally ill people to end their lives.
She is the latest high-profile figure to call for a change in the law in the past few weeks. The former television presenter and charity campaigner Esther Rantzen revealed that she intended to travel to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end her life if her stage 4 lung cancer could no longer be treated.
Keir Starmer, the Labour party leader, has said he is in favour of a free vote in parliament on the issue. MPs voted overwhelmingly against changing the law in the last vote in 2015.
Assisted suicide is banned in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. There is no specific offence of assisted suicide in Scotland, but euthanasia can be prosecuted as murder or culpable homicide.
The Commons health and social care committee is expected to deliver a report into assisted dying in the coming months. Ruddock gave evidence to the committee last year.
She said she was “faced with total horror” in the final days of Doran’s life. He was diagnosed with bowel cancer shortly after the couple retired and at the time had said he would like to be helped to die in order to avoid extreme pain and indignity.
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“He was a skeleton. He was doubly incontinent. He had to be helped to get to a commode. And finally, in the last couple of weeks, he was totally bedridden. Wearing napkins. This was a vigorous, funny, intelligent, marvellous man. Reduced to this condition, I think most people would probably wish for their lives to end.”
Ruddock said she was in favour of a law similar to ones in the US state of Oregon and some European countries that allow doctors to medically assist a person to die in tightly defined circumstances, including where they have a terminal illness and are fully cognisant of what they want to do.
“This seems to me to be entirely humane and the shocking thing is that people in Britain have this kind of thing done to their pets all the time. They cannot bear to see a pet suffer but we allow human beings to suffer terribly,” said Ruddock.
